Child Welfare 'Transformation' Gets Changes

By MARGIE MENZELTHE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA

Monday

Sep 2, 2013 at 11:31 PM

ORLANDO | When former Department of Children and Families Secretary David Wilkins resigned under fire last month, he left behind a much-ballyhooed "transformation" of the child-welfare system.He'd planned to overhaul the way child-welfare workers evaluate the risk of leaving abused and neglected children in their homes. He'd also wanted to move more money toward prevention services, even though critics said that left at-risk children still more vulnerable.Then a horrific string of child deaths undermined his efforts. Since April, as many as 20 children already known to DCF have died of abuse or neglect — amid charges that better decision-making by front-line child-welfare professionals could have prevented their deaths.Now, parts of Wilkins' revamp are going forward, but with a difference."You cannot have meaningful transformation without evidence, without science," said Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman, who was among about 2,500 people gathered in Orlando last week for a DCF child-protection summit. "He didn't seem to understand that." Evidence is driving the bus now. And at the heart of the debate is how to predict which parents will mistreat their kids and what to do about it. Wilkins' new child-protection initiative had been in the works throughout most of his tenure. It included a safety framework — a methodology for making decisions — used by 17 other states. But it's not fully up and running yet and wasn't a factor in the recent deaths."Right now, we don't use anything," interim DCF Secretary Esther Jacobo said. "We have not had any structure across the state about how we make these decisions. So this will be an enormous step forward for our (child protective investigators)."Wilkins' plans for transformation also included a risk-assessment tool that has been used in Miami-Dade to classify families by the likelihood that they will maltreat their children in the future. It's called SDM, for Structured Decision Making, and was developed by the Children's Research Center at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. But Wilkins altered the assessment tool. The center's director, Raelene Freitag, withdrew from the collaboration with DCF after learning the department had "substantially modified" the tool without notifying her."The impact of this is serious," Freitag wrote. "This will result in those misclassified families not receiving inter≠vention."That's why, Lederman said, the post-Wilkins DCF is all about evidence."He didn't understand that you can't take an evidence-based instrument and modify it, because it's no longer evidence-based," she said. "So we no longer have any idea of whether that works or not."Attempts to reach Wilkins on Thursday were unsuccessful. His old cellphone number was no longer in service, and DCF spokespeople said they did not know how to contact him.Now the unaltered assessment tool is back and part of DCF's new approach. And the department has withdrawn the rule it had been implementing to make the transformation legal — after children's advocates argued that it left too many opportunities for children to fall through the cracks.Lederman added that Jacobo "immediately stepped up" to start the process of making Florida the first state in the country to have evidence-based interventions in every circuit."We have her support on that, and that would never have happened under the prior secretary," she said.The three-day DCF child-protection summit in Orlando has come at a critical time for the agency — and as the various parts of the child-welfare system prepare for a different way of doing business.DCF Assistant Deputy Secretary for Operations Pete Digre said the agency's safety methodology will differ from past overhauls because it "requires a safety plan that is number one, verifiable and number two, veri≠fied."Digre said he expects to "fully turn on all the tools" by late winter."Transformation is, to my way of thinking, slightly grandiose," Digre said. "It sounds a little bit like a religious concept." He called DCF's new direction "a progressive improvement of what we do every day, taking every mistake seriously and being totally committed to do better in the future.""The state has suffered," Lederman said. "But I think we're on a much better course."

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.